Overview
Acting Out is the first appearance in English of two short books published by Bernard Stiegler in 2003. In How I Became a Philosopher, he outlines his transformation during a five-year period of incarceration for armed robbery. Isolated from what had been his world, Stiegler began to conduct a kind of experiment in phenomenological research. Inspired by the Greek stoic Epictetus, Stiegler began to read, write, and discover his vocation, eventually studying philosophy in correspondence with G rard Granel who was an important influence on a number of French philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, who was later Stiegler's teacher.
The second book, To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us, is a powerful distillation of Stiegler's analysis of the contemporary world. He maintains that a growing loss of a sense of individual and collective existence leads to a decreased ability to love oneself, and, by extension, others. This predicament is viewed through a tragic event: in 2002, in Nanterre, France, Richard Durn, a local activist, stormed the city's town hall, shooting and killing eight people. Durn committed suicide the following day. The later publication of Durn's his journal revealed a man struggling with the feeling that he did not exist, for which he tried to compensate by committing an atrocity. For Stiegler, this exemplifies how love of self becomes pathological: a "me" assassinates an "us" with which it cannot identify.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780804758680
- ISBN-10: 0804758689
- Publisher: Stanford University Press
- Publish Date: October 2008
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.55 pounds
- Page Count: 112
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